Art Quotes

“Does art have a future? Performance genres like opera, theater, music and dance are thriving all over the world, but the visual arts have been in slow decline for nearly 40 years. No major figure of profound influence has emerged in painting or sculpture since the waning of Pop Art and the birth of Minimalism in the early 1970s.”

-- Camille Paglia

“Translation is the art of failure.”

-- Umberto Eco

“The reward of art is not fame or success but intoxication: that is why so many bad artists are unable to give it up.”

-- Jean Cocteau

“Life is not an exact science, it is an art.”

-- Samuel Butler

“The art world is an all-volunteer force. No one has to be here if he or she doesn't want to be, and we should be associating with anyone we want to.”

-- Jerry Saltz

“There is nothing in the world of art like the songs mother used to sing.”

-- Billy Sunday

“A sculptor is a person who is interested in the shape of things, a poet in words, a musician by sounds.”

-- Henry Moore

“The whole art of teaching is only the art of awakening the natural curiosity of young minds for the purpose of satisfying it afterwards.”

-- Anatole France

“I am an anarchist in politics and an impressionist in art as well as a symbolist in literature. Not that I understand what these terms mean, but I take them to be all merely synonyms of pessimist.”

-- Henry Adams

“Literature is the art of discovering something extraordinary about ordinary people, and saying with ordinary words something extraordinary.”

-- Boris Pasternak